Overview of the TREC 2007 Question Answering Track

Published

December 1, 2008

Author(s)

Hoa T. Dang, Diane Kelly, Jimmy Lin

Abstract

The TREC 2007 question answering (QA) track contained two tasks: the main task consisting of series of factoid, list, and ``Other'' questions organized around a set of targets, and the complex, interactive question answering (ciQA) task. The main task differed from previous years in that the document collection comprised blogs in addition to newswire documents, requiring systems to process diverse genres of unstructured text. The evaluation of factoid and list responses distinguished between answers that were globally correct (with respect to the document collection), and those that were only locally correct (with respect to the supporting document but not to the overall document collection). The ciQA task provided a framework for participants to investigate interaction in the context of complex information needs. Standing in for surrogate users, assessors interacted with QA systems over the live Web; this setup allowed participants to experiment with more complex interaction interfaces but also revealed limitations in the ciQA design for evaluation of interactive systems.

Citation

Special Publication (NIST SP) -

NIST Pub Series

Special Publication (NIST SP)

Pub Type

NIST Pubs

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Keywords

evaluation, question answering

Citation

Dang, H. , Kelly, D. and Lin, J. (2008), Overview of the TREC 2007 Question Answering Track, Special Publication (NIST SP), National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=890018 (Accessed October 27, 2025)